, an
excellent type of early sixteenth-century building, with its old
figured tiles and high gable, and the division between the ground
floor and the next storey strongly marked by carvings and brackets.
You are now not only in a typical part of the old city, but on ground
that has borne the name since the fourteenth century, and earned it
(as did the Rue Harenguerie) from the kind of commerce carried on
there. You have already passed the Rue des Fourchettes on your right,
and a little further on is a still more fascinating name, the Marche
aux Balais, where brooms were sold in 1644, after their modest
commerce had been forbidden near St. Martin sur Renelle. On one of the
small houses round it is the date 1602, and near it the carving of a
salamander, which evidently gave its name to the Rue de la Salamandre,
which had originally been known as "Mauconseil" ever since 1280, a
name that is almost as appropriate to its darkness now as "Salamandre"
must have been suggestive of its condition in the sixteenth century.
It needs very little imagination to conceive amid these surroundings
just such a "Cour de Miracle" in Rouen as Victor Hugo described in
Paris. And, indeed, it is but quite lately that a conglomeration of
tottering and leprous houses, without owners, and never entered by the
police, was torn down. The Rue Coupe-Gorge, the Rue de l'Aumone,
especially the horrible Clos St. Marc, have not long been swept away.
Every cellar and every attic seemed to communicate by tortuous and
filthy passages with the next. No visitor was admitted who had not the
hallmark of crime visibly upon him, or was not a member of that
loathsome confraternity of thieves and beggars who lived by their
raids upon society at large.

[Illustration: RUE DE L'EPICERIE WITH PORTAIL DE LA CALENDE IN THE
DISTANCE]

Straight out of the Marche aux Balais the Rue du Hallage burrows under
the ancient houses towards the river, hemmed in by walls on all sides,
that catch up every breath of air that moves, and shut out nearly all
the light. The backs of its crowded dwellings you can see from the
great square into which the Rue de l'Epicerie directly leads, the
Place de la Haute Vieille Tour, where you must go forthwith and see
the beautiful little building that was set up for the great ceremony
of the Fierte St. Romain.

This was the ceremony that gave their one great day in all the year to
the drowsy archways of the Rue du Hallage; for the Marche aux Bal